Holy Corpses: Incorrupt Bodies And Early Modern Science | Prof. Nuno Castel-Branco

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 7 June 2024

⏱️ 44 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on March 26th, 2024, at North Carolina State University.

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About the Speaker:

Nuno Castel-Branco is a Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He completed his Ph.D. in the history of science at Johns Hopkins University in 2021 after earning an M.Sc. in Physics at the University of Lisbon. Previously, he was a Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti in Florence and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He has spoken about Galileo, Copernicus, and science and religion to broad audiences in the United States and Europe. His first book, The Traveling Anatomist, uses Nicolaus Steno as a tour guide for science, medicine, and religion in seventeenth-century Europe. His writing has appeared in places like the Wall Street Journal and Scientific American, as well as in research journals such as Notes and Records of the Royal Society, and Annals of Science.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.8	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:13.1	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.1	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at
0:22.5	to mystic institute.org. On the morning of May 26, 1595, the Catholic, or the devout Catholic priest,
0:32.6	Philip Neri, died in Rome. You may have heard of him. His body was brought back to the Kiesanuova, the mother
0:40.7	church of the congregation of the oratory, which Philip Neri had founded. Throughout the day,
0:46.7	cardinals, bishops, and priests came to this church to pay their respects to Philip Neri,
0:52.8	coming and going masses being celebrated all the time.
0:56.6	And at night, almost 24 hours after he died, the church was closed except for a select group of people,
1:05.5	a short group, a small group of about 30 people. These people were oratorian priests from Rome, the members of the
1:12.5	congregation that Philip had founded, a few lay disciples of Philip, and the protagonists of the
1:18.9	evening, a group of at least six medical experts, three physicians, two surgeons and one pharmacists.
1:27.3	In front of everyone, these experts opened Philip
1:30.3	near his body to find out that his heart was extraordinarily enlarged, which explained why two ribs
1:37.3	around the heart were broken. It did not take long for everyone to associate Philip's enlarged heart with his intense love for God.
1:47.5	The next day, after more crowds came to church to pray, his disciples buried his body.
1:54.8	Four years later, the body was exhumed.
1:59.5	They found parts of the coffin rotten and the vestments broken into dust.
2:07.2	The body, however, was found in a state of unusual physical preservation, as officially
2:13.0	confirmed by four doctors in Rome, some of whom had already testified about Philip's heart.
2:20.4	St. Philip Neri, therefore, is one of the many saints whose bodies, because they did not
	...

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